Talk:The Contingency
The language spoken to the dog Bear is not Dutch, but German. A slight nuisance is when John informs the crooks keeping the dog Bear that it's trained in Dutch, and subsequently starts talking German to the dog. 12:34, January 7, 2013 (UTC)Arno Exact commands: Foei! Stil!......Af liggen... Seems Dutch, unless there is anything to the contrary Exact Role of Pennsylvania#2 Is he Special Counsel ,played by Jay O. Sanders, (Head of Office of Special Counsel) or is he some sort of High Level functionary Dewey Decimal System or Library of Congress? An editor has just added the following to the trivia section: :: *Although the script has Reese saying that the key to the code is the Dewey Decimal System, the library books are in fact cataloged using the Library of Congress Classification (LCC) system, preceded by the first word of the title. Dewey Decimal System (DDS) classifications are strictly numerical. For example, books about dentistry fall under the number 617.6 , while books about pediatric dentistry (a subdivision of dentistry) fall under 617.60083. Library of Congress uses one or two letters followed by numbers. So dentistry is categorized under RK. Numbers following the letters are used for subdivisions within dentistry. So "Uncertainty Romeo Kilo" would be a book about dentistry whose title begins with the word "Uncertainty". The books that Reese pulls at the end of the episode confirm this. "Ayacucho GP" corresponds to Ayacucho Grammar and Dictionary, by Gary John Parker. The spine is labelled "Ayacucho GP 498". "Deterministic HS" corresponds to Deterministic Chaos: An Introduction, with the spine labeled "Deterministic HS 003". I'm not sold on this being correct, and have reverted to discuss. The labels on the Library's books are much simpler than one would see on a book identified by the Library of Congress coding system. LoC codes on books tend to have a series of cascading codes, including the publication year (see the image of a series of books on Java coded in LoC). DDS codes are much simpler, such as we see described above and limited to one row of numbers and one row of letters. I spoke to a friend who is a retired Librarian, and see explained that the three-letter code can vary. Generally, it's the first three letter of the author's last name unless the book has no author, at which time it would be the first three letters of the title. However, she said that DDS evolved, and at one time, the code was the first letter of the title plus the two letters of the author's last name. This fits with the Library being an older branch one that was closed and had been abandoned for an indeterminate length of time. LofC didn't become the dominant coding system until the 90s, and still may not be used in smaller, neighborhood libraries, where the more accessible DDS is still used (I use the main library in a major suburb of Los Angeles regularly, and it's still in DDS.) I think what the editor might be seeing are overlaps between DDS and LoC, plus the show taking a few liberties with DDS for simplicity. --LeverageGuru (talk) 17:24, November 20, 2014 (UTC) Removing or adding to "contingency plan" trivium I suggest that the trivia section addition about "contingency" being misused in this article be removed. I tried to do so myself but I realize that I may have been in violation of ettiquite, so my apologies if that is the case. Contingency is (in my experience) commonly used not just to refer to an event but also to plans for that event, so much so that the default Google dictionary entry for it includes: *a provision for an unforeseen event or circumstance."a contingency reserve" Admittedly, this is not shown in most other dictionaries, so I imagine that I am probably in the group of people unknowingly using it in a more colloquial way. However, if there's going to be borderline prescriptivist language trivia in this article, I think it might be a good idea to research how common the "misuse" is and mention that. Davises (talk) 14:38, September 4, 2017 (UTC) : This isn't like the Wikipedia; the standard for inclusion is much more relaxed. There's nothing wrong with noting that the show misused a word. Your Google dictionary example actually supports the point made by the entry rather than contradicting it: the definition is "a future event or circumstance that is possible but cannot be predicted with certainty"; you cited a sentence using the term with a modifier. Besides, shat we hear others use (or misuse) in informal speech isn't necessarily what's correct. --LeverageGuru (talk) 22:20, September 4, 2017 (UTC)